“The first time we went to Wallenberg and skated the top part”

Why does FTC’s first video bare James Kelch in its intro, but he’s got no part in it?

What German movie actually inspired the title page in said intro?

How could index cards help editing a video?

Was the EMB crew a lot into the Daisy Age hip-hop thing, at first?

Those are a lot of questions, people, which will be answered in the actual book regarding the masterpiece, that one shop flick that made a Mecca out of SF, or more precisely out of the Embarcadero and Wallenberg’s top part. Finally… it was called. FTC’s first video, put together by Aaron Meza, sort of changed the game. To go to the bottom of things, we thought we’d sit down with Meza to get the skinny on it. Boy, did we, and the code ended up being cracked. Here are only a few amuse-bouches that transpired from the two-hour interview…

Seb Carayol: So, you were filming with Kelch, but did you have to introduce yourself to all the other skaters, “Oh I’m the guy doing the video”?Aaron Meza: The thing is, I got really good friends with Kent. Right away, I’d call him when he’d go to UCLA. It was all a grown out family, he wasn’t just like some boss, “get it done!” He knew what was up, he’s a City kid.

They had a really defined team at one point, but shortly therefater, it started kinda going nuts, like who’s gonna be in the video. Like, Chris Branagh rode for FTC! He lived outside the City, a couple hours away. One day Kent was like, “Hey I called Chris Branagh’s dad, you guys gonna meet up at Embarcadero at 9 O’Clock on Saturday!”

In case you had forgotten… Chris Branagh was this little thing.

I was like, alright, whatever. You could tell then he was already not into skating. He just was there with his whole family, they totally seemed like out-of-towners, he just filmed a bunch of stuff really fast, like, a flat ground nollie in his line. he didn’t wanna hang out at Embarcadero all day, he was more like,”let’s just get it done.” They didn’t seem like they bossed him, it was after Rubbish Heap and before Love Child.

He just was over it real fast and then he was like, “Where can I get fireworks? I wanna get fireworks!” I told him to just go to Chinatown. It was this weird… “You’re filming, I’m skating, let’s get it over with, I got firecrackers to go buy.” He wasn’t in the FTC video at all.

I think that the video pushed this along, but it was obvious that maybe a couple people not necessarily 100% associated with FTC were gonna be part of it. You know what? There were so many skaters flooding the City at this time too, that fueled this as well.

Was it a stressful video to put together?AM : It was just hard to make people take it seriously. Even myself I’m sure. Throughout the whole time I was filming for Love Child, all this Blind video stuff, I was supposed to film Henry for this video and he was giving everything to Blind –I think Kent kind of knew that a little bit. First off, without Socrates giving me all this leftover footage for the first video, the video probably would never have been made -and it was only maybe 15 minutes as it is.

Even Mike, before the last two days, didn’t have a lot of footage. But he got all this cool stuff at the end, those lines, it was the first time we went to Wallenberg and skated the top part. It definitely started all that. People skated it a little bit, but those were the three lines that shut it off.